Webb has confirmed the most distant fast radio burst, which came from a galaxy 3 billion years after the Big Bang

science & techESA/Webb

Webb has confirmed the most distant fast radio burst, which came from a galaxy 3 billion years after the Big Bang

the gist

Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to study the host galaxy of the most distant fast radio burst known. Fast radio bursts are brief, intense flashes of radio waves from far outside our galaxy. By detecting light from oxygen and nitrogen in the galaxy, the team measured its redshift, which tells how much its light has been stretched by the expansion of the universe. That measurement places the burst just 3 billion years after the Big Bang. The result connects a mysterious signal to a specific, very early galaxy and gives astronomers a fixed distance for it.

so what

Knowing where a fast radio burst comes from and how far away it is lets astronomers use these flashes as probes of the material between galaxies. It also shows Webb can study galaxies that are very far and very faint.

fun fact

Fast radio bursts were first discovered in 2007 and were long a mystery.

more on this

background

In radio astronomy, a fast radio burst (FRB) is a transient radio wave caused by a high-energy astrophysical process that is not yet understood. The duration of an FRB is typically around a few milliseconds, although ultra-fast radio bursts may only last 15 microseconds or less. Astronomers estimate the average FRB releases as much energy in a millisecond as the Sun puts out in three days. While extremely energetic at their source, the strength of the signal reaching Earth has been described as 1,000 times less than from a mobile phone on the Moon.

The first FRB was discovered by Duncan Lorimer and his student David Narkevic in 2007 when they were looking through archival pulsar survey data, and it is therefore commonly referred to as the Lorimer burst. Many FRBs have since been recorded, including several that have been detected repeating in seemingly irregular ways. Only one FRB has been detected to repeat in a regular way: FRB 180916 seems to pulse every 16.35 days.

From Wikipedia: Fast radio burst (CC BY-SA 4.0) ↗

see

Psr1909, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

NASA, ESA, A. Mannings (UC Santa Cruz), W. Fong (Northweste…, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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historyThe Public Domain Review1909 · United States

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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